Simaetha's lover hasn't come to her door in twelve days. At night she spins a magic wheel, burns barley and bay leaves, and asks for drugs as strong as Medea's. Then she tells the moon the whole story.
Press this book. Your gift commissions the Great Library’s word-by-word interlinear The Sorceress, and the day it is made, it is free for everyone, forever. You are not buying a copy; you are paying for it to exist.
Give what you like. A few dollars helps, or fund the whole of Idyll 2 and become its Founder. Every contribution presses it closer to real.
This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. The Sorceress’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
Simaetha has been dropped by Delphis, a handsome young athlete. With her slave girl Thestylis she works a spell to draw him back: the magic wheel, barley, bay leaves and bran thrown on the fire, a fringe torn from his cloak. When the girl goes off to smear a potion on his doorpost, Simaetha turns to the moon and tells how she first saw him and how it went wrong. The whole poem is 166 lines. Nothing is readable here yet; support it and it will be.
Theocritus came from Syracuse and wrote in the 3rd century BC, partly in Alexandria under Ptolemy II. He is remembered as the inventor of pastoral poetry, songs of shepherds and goatherds, but this poem is set in a town at night. Its title in the manuscripts, Pharmakeutriai, means 'women who work drugs'.
The spell is real ancient practice. The iynx was a wheel named for the wryneck, the bird once bound to it; wheels like it appear on Greek vases, and love spells of the same kind fill the magical papyri centuries later. Near the start Simaetha asks that her drugs be no weaker than Circe's, or Medea's, or golden-haired Perimede's.
Making an interlinear The Sorceress is real work: freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Idyll 2 gets made, and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
This isn’t a purchase. It’s a commission. You’re not buying a copy; you’re paying for the thing to exist, and putting your name (if you like) on the first true The Sorceress that anyone can read for free.
Leave your email and we’ll write to you the day the The Sorceress opens. No other mail, ever.
Read our finished collection · the library · The Great Library Project
Reading is always free. Patrons and founders are the ones who keep it that way.